


Picking Sides

by WolfsHowl5678



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: Angst, Corrin Remembers, Female My Unit | Kamui | Corrin, Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright Spoilers, Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest Spoilers, Fire Emblem Fates: Revelation Spoilers, Gen, Post-Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, Post-Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-25 22:55:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14987375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfsHowl5678/pseuds/WolfsHowl5678
Summary: She wishes she didn't remember.





	Picking Sides

The silence is pervasive enough that for a moment all she can hear is her own heartbeat thundering in the dark.

 

It takes her a minute to realize what's wrong, to realize the problem with the silence in her room. Her hands fly over to the opposite side of the bed, and find nothing but cold sheets, sheets that don’t feel slept in at all. A tiny, painful whimper escapes her mouth as she moves, throwing off the sheets and stumbling out of the house, the cool breath of wind refreshing to her sweaty skin.

 

She had thought it was just a nightmare, a bad dream like so many others she had had during the war, but she felt it keenly now, the gaping hole in her heart and her mind, empty room simply a reminder. Her hands clasped around the railing of the balcony as she looked out, branches swaying gently in the breeze. 

 

A choked cry echoed from her mouth as she slumped against the wall, breathing ragged and pained as she remembered everything. Remembered betraying her family in Nohr for those of her birth, remembered the battles and the losses and the pain, remembered the faces of everyone she loved as they died around her.

 

She remembered the second time, waking up back as a child, living through years of loneliness and solitary in the Northern Fortress, wondering if siding with Nohr would have been better, would have spared her the mistakes she made. She remembered siding with Nohr, watching the pain and the ache in her birth families face, the ones she had gotten to know so well last time, the ones who now fell apart without her. She remembered befriending those she had killed last time, and killing those she had befriended, a thousand more pains and guilts added onto her growing stack. 

 

She remembered the third time she woke up, back as a child and forced to live through her life once again, nightmares of people's faces as they died and the bloodstains of war haunting her mind. It had caused no end of worry for her Nohr siblings when she woke up screaming, clutching at her sheets and trying in vain to shift into the dragon form she was so used to. When she dreamed of siding with Hoshido she clung desperately to Jakob, to Felicia, and she couldn't look Flora in the eye, couldn’t stand too close to Xander or Elise. When she dreamed of Nohr she clung to her siblings like a burr, gripping at them like they were her only lifeline, her only protection against the darkness of her own mind, of her own choices. 

 

When she ended up in Hoshido, she flinched at every movement, every gesture her siblings made, clawing at her own sanity with nothing left but Azura to hold her together. She muffled her screams, stamped down on her guilt, and tried her best to look those she had killed and betrayed and hurt in the eye. 

 

When her mother died again, she felt a cool sort of apathy take over. She shifted, and she attacked, floating outside her mind as she watched the events unfold like they always had, like they always will. When she got her sword, the blade Yato shining brightly in her hand, she looked at it and wondered. ‘Why pick me?’ She thought, ‘Why do you keep picking me?’ And then they were rushed off once more, to the field and the choice and the pain, and as she stared at her family, both of her families, she wondered. ‘Why do I have to pick a side?’

 

So she choose no side, choose no family, hoped desperately not to watch everyone else die, and for her attempt, for her hope, she got called traitor and run out, attacked and spurned and hurt, and she woke now with nothing to comfort her, no one there to help her, clinging to her sanity and self with as much strength as she had left.


End file.
